A large auto manufacturer asked a consulting firm to evaluate its competitive position in relation to ride-sharing startups building autonomous vehicles. Instead of viewing this as a classic strategy ...

Across key societal institutions, such as courtrooms, classrooms, and newsrooms, we have an unspoken contract that says only lawyers, teachers, and journalists are entitled to ask questions. In a ...

A version of this article appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of strategy+business. “Everything went quiet.” That’s how one manager described the workplace immediately after his company announced a ...

A version of this article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of strategy+business. In the blink of an eye, COVID-19 disrupted the business environment and illuminated a profound, sometimes overlooked ...

The job of a chief executive officer at a large publicly held company may seem to be quite comfortable — high pay, excellent benefits, elevated social status, and access to private jets. But the ...

Imagine that you’re one of millions of people whose job is threatened by digital technology. You’re the compliance officer at a bank, an operations manager on an assembly line, a technical writer, a ...

Evidence is mounting that conventional approaches to strategic human capital management are broken. This is particularly true for performance management (PM) systems—the appraisal approaches in which ...

Industrial revolutions are momentous events. By most reckonings, there have been only three. The first was triggered in the 1700s by the commercial steam engine and the mechanical loom. The harnessing ...

Professor Robert Sutton is, above all else, a humanist. That makes him something of a rare breed in the academy of elite management thinkers. Whereas many of the most noted business scholars of the ...

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Almost everyone feels the temptation to answer “10 cents” because the sum $1.10 so neatly ...

When Baskin-Robbins, now the world’s largest ice cream chain, opened in 1953, its line of 31 flavors — one for every day of the month — was a novelty. At the time, such variety was unheard of, and ...

How often have you heard somebody — a new CEO, a journalist, a management consultant, a leadership guru, a fellow employee — talk about the urgent need to change the culture? They want to make it ...